No Country For Old Men: a masterpiece?
The critics are pretty much united in their praise of the Coen Brothers' latest, a taut, brooding thriller based on the award-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy.
"No Country can be enjoyed as a straightforward genre thriller (and there are suspense sequences here that rival the best of Hitchcock)," writes the BBC's Paul Arendt. "Performances are universally excellent, from Jones's mournful drawl of narration to Bardem's terrifying yet strangely hilarious assassin."
"This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely."
"The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American film-making looks like, and they have supplied a corrective adjustment to the excesses of goofy-quirky comedy that damaged their recent work," writes our own Peter Bradshaw. "The result is a dark, violent and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers."
We searched far and wide for a counterbalance to the tidal wave of support for No Country, and finally found it in the shape of The Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu, who, it seems, just doesn't believe the hype. "No Country for Old Men has been saluted for its mastery of mood," he writes. "Actually, particularly in the second hour, it's all over the place. The introduction of Woody Harrelson's bounty-hunter character injects superfluous levity to proceedings; an important character disappears rather desultorily; the ending is a weary and self-important exhalation. Is it a masterpiece? Not even close."
What do you reckon to No Country For Old Men? Is it really all its cracked up to be? Or did it leave you a little disappointed?
